Blue Stew (Second Edition) (26 page)

“It
is
a really cool place,” agreed Nigel.

Henry shrugged, “Well, I’m guessing it’d be affordable. As I heard it, Doris actually first suggested finding a long-term house sitter. It was her son who said they should at least try to get someone to agree to cover the bills, and maybe a little extra.”

“
Awesome
. Who do I talk to to swoop in on this?”

“I’ll talk to Greg tomorrow.”

Walter slapped Henry affectionately on the back and turned to Maddie, seated—as always—next to him, “You ever been to Doris’s place?”

“No . . . I think I’ve seen it . . . on the hill, up there?”

“Yeah. You would
love
it. Way closer to your family’s farm, too.”

She smiled, “Cool. Every time I’m at your place, I keep looking around for the mini-golf clubs . . .”

Henry laughed the kind of deep, powerful laugh that all men with black beards should have, “I’ve
always
thought that, too! Fucking Steve pulled that carpeting straight off an old mini-golf course, I swear.”

“He might’ve,” said Walter, nodding grimly. “He’s an industrious bastard.”

•   •   •

By the end of that week, Walter had moved into Doris Hanes’s house on the hill.

The agreement, all made verbally between Walter and Doris’s son Hank, was for four-hundred a month flat, with Hank acting as the landlord and covering any general maintenance expenses that might arise. This came with the two-way assurance that Walter would live there for at least three months: giving Doris time to choose to either move back in or put the house on the market, and giving Walter a small sense of security.

One particular question was soundly avoided throughout the easy negotiations.

Walter, therefore, was immensely relieved when—on the blustery Saturday afternoon when he and his friends piled his boxed belongings into the house—he peeked into the kitchen and saw that the floor had been newly retiled. Someone had chosen a checkerboard pattern of faded green and blue. Walter couldn’t help but think it had been a deliberate choice, selecting the two colors on opposite ends of the color spectrum from dark red.

•   •   •

For the remainder of the winter and into the early spring, the house—with its cozy, natural charms and the relative air of freshness and newness shared by all of them—became the favored hangout place for Walter’s friends: for their games nights, their movie nights, or for assembling together and carpooling to more ambitions destinations, such as the ski slopes or the bowling lanes.

To say the same for Maddie, to say it was a favored hangout place, would have been a gross understatement. Practically, she lived there with Walter.

It became Walter’s second favorite near-daily routine, when he and Maddie would cuddle together on the bright covered porch after work, wrapped in a goose-feather quilt that Donna Wendell had made many winters ago. They would gaze through the large windows as the sun went down over the frosty valley, lending a deep purple hue to the white snow blanketing the forest below. More than once, in fact, this second favorite near-daily routine got wonderfully muddled together with Walter’s first favorite . . .

Yes, it was a beautiful winter.

The happiest time of Walter Boyd’s life.

There was only one blemish: They never found Timothy Glass.

Not even a fruitless trace of the madman was reported. And the seed of regret that had been planted the day of Walter and Maddie’s first date grew to be an ugly weed of a plant, which he pushed, for the time being, far into the corner of his consciousness. It was barely alive in the shadows of so many good things, but it was alive all the same, rooted deep, ready to flourish and spread through the remainder of his consciousness, if Timothy ever chose to throw some
fertilizer
over it.

And why
wouldn’t
he? He had run off with such a large stock of his Blue Stew. Could something about the encounter with Walter have shaken
Timothy’s
life outlook, too? Could one cold season be full of such amazing fortune?

J
eremy Baker was abnormally focused on the sides of his neck.

Was it feeling sore or swollen? At
all
? He found that the more he squeezed and poked at it with his small fingers, the funnier it felt, which was immensely promising. His older brother, Steven, his first time there two years ago had come home early with something their parents called “strep throat.” They had poked at his neck frequently and had commented on the swelling. He remembered that.

After last night, the thought had transformed into Jeremy’s one desperate hope.

He couldn’t make it through another night. Last night had been his first night, and it had been everything he’d been dreading for the past month. It had been so
dark
in the small two-person tent. His brother had been in a sleeping bag next to him, but he had fallen sound asleep within minutes of settling down, and Jeremy couldn’t see him anyways, so it made no difference. He had been alone and utterly vulnerable.

The camp counselors had talked about the dangers of bringing foods or snacks into their tents all day—too frequently, in fact—but Steven just
wouldn’t
listen. He had insisted that if the Snickers wrapper was still sealed, no animal could smell it. Jeremy hadn’t believed him for a second, and all night long he regretted having been too much of a coward to rat his brother out when he had had the chance. He knew that if a wolf, or—god forbid—a bear had smelled it in their tent and had decided to tear through the weak fabric, the wild animal would’ve found a tasty eleven-year-old kid to go as an entrée to the chocolate bar appetizer. There would’ve been no way his brother could’ve fought it off, nor would their scoutmaster
possibly
have come fast enough to save him as he got eaten alive . . .

For every sound he had heard that night, Jeremy conceived an accompanying image of a stalking predator—always with razor sharp teeth and bright, narrow eyes—slinking towards their tent. Unfortunately for him and his grim imagination, the forests of Western Massachusetts can have a lot to say at night, if you’re quiet and you listen closely.

“What the hell are you doing, Jeremy?”

His brother, Steven Baker, came up behind him as he sat at their troop’s assigned table.

Jeremy looked up. He had been digging into the sides of his neck with his fingers.

“I . . . I think I might have strep throat.”

Steven set his tray of scrambled eggs, sausage, and milk down. Scoffing, he jostled his little brother’s hair roughly, “You’re such a faker. Come up with something original, you baby.”

“I’m serious,” Jeremy protested weakly. He realized now, though, how his parents would never believe him anyways. He had been whining about coming to this spring camp for weeks, and now for him to come down with the
exact
same illness that had brought his brother home early two years ago . . . It wouldn’t matter if he even
did
have strep throat. Which, on the hidden level beyond his stubborn childish denial, he knew he
didn’t
.

“C’mon, it gets better,” said Steven, now seated next to him. “Get some breakfast.”

Jeremy looked behind them warily.

They were in a giant mess hall—giant to a small kid, at any rate. The ceiling vaulted high above them, opened up by four long skylight windows, these intersected carefully by a network of massive support beams. On the floor below, lit by the light of the morning sky falling down from above, there were a dozen long wooden tables, each one assigned to a different Boy Scout troop, each one carved thoroughly with the signatures of decades of children’s pocket knives.

At the far end of the mess hall was a buffet layout of sweet-smelling breakfast foods and coolers filled with various drinks, around which a large crowd of children in their brown patch-covered uniforms squirmed. The crowd did not seem to be thinning. It was still too big and imposing for Jeremy.

“I’m not hungry yet,” said Jeremy, looking forward again.

Steven shrugged, chewing on a mouthful of ketchup-drenched scrambled eggs.

“Steve,” a curly redhead across from the Baker brothers spoke up, “didn’t you see the Kool-Aide? It’s really
good
.” He held up a clear plastic cup of a bright orange liquid.

Steven finished his mouthful, “Yeah. I like milk with breakfast. I don’t know why.”

“You’re weird. Everyone else is having the Kool-Aid.”

Jeremy had tuned this trite exchange out as his mind shifted to the future. This “spring camp” was a three-night Friday-through-Monday ordeal. His Mom had really wanted him to go because the focus was on learning about animal and plant lifecycles that begin anew in the spring, including trips to local maple-sugaring farms, “sings of spring” hikes, and so on.  Whereas the primary summer camp, in his brother’s words, “Was all about cooler things like shooting rifles and archery and fishing.”

The summer camp was
eight
nights long. However, his parents had hinted that, if he made it through this spring camp—and gave it a fair chance—they might let him choose for himself if he wanted to go to the summer camp. So . . . he would just have to suffer through two more terrible nights, and then never do this again.

“
Oh my god!
” screamed a man two tables away.

Jeremy snapped back into the present. His first reaction to the scream was the thought that
men
aren’t supposed to scream like that. He had heard his
mom
scream like that once when a spider had jumped onto her lap, a few years ago.

The scream had a rippling effect. Nearby children began to scream now, and someone’s silverware clattered to the floor. Camp counselors started running towards the commotion, dodging kids and their trays of food—unsuccessfully, in one instance, causing Jeremy to laugh nervously.

Another male voice then rose from directly across the hall, quickly reaching a pitch as shrill the first man’s, a pitch of jumping-spider terror, “Frank!
Frank! What are you doing?
”

Jeremy pulled himself upright and looked towards this second, closer screamer. A middle-aged scoutmaster with a thick goatee was now throwing his overweight body over and across his troop’s table—sending food flying—scrambling towards a young scout whose face was planted on the table, resting in a pool of ketchup.

More shouting erupted form a far corner of the mess hall.

Jeremy frowned. Large implications were hard for him to pick up on, especially at his age, so he wasn’t too alarmed by the chaos breaking loose around him, not immediately. He was afraid of the
dark
; there was nothing
really
to fear on bright, sunny days, right? And—
hey
—maybe, if whatever was going on was bad enough, they would all get to go home early?

A very different loud noise now stole Jeremy’s bouncing attention, a sound like a slamming door. He turned towards this new sound, which had seemed very close. He found the source right in front of him, in fact, and it almost made him laugh when he first saw it: His brother’s redhead friend across the table raised his body up and then smashed his forehead down on the table, making the slamming-door sound. Then, mechanically, the kid raised his body up again, before thrusting his head back down with startling speed, punctuated by a third loud
thunk
.

It was Steve’s tone of voice that finally told Jeremy he should be scared, “Eddy,
stop
that. What’s
wrong
with you?”

When Eddy lifted his head, Jeremy saw that his nose had folded to one side and blood was gushing out over his mouth.